


Ghosts of Our Yesterdays

by Renata Lord (snowlight)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Mirror Universe, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gore, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 12:47:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10662915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowlight/pseuds/Renata%20Lord
Summary: A retelling of The Conscience of the King.





	Ghosts of Our Yesterdays

Lenore Karidian was dead.

She gave Kirk an earnest struggle and he took pleasure in that, but by the time Kirk took the knife out from her heart with a twisting flourish, all sounds coming from her had already ceased. It thrilled him to see the light fade from her beautiful gray eyes.

Rigor mortis was not a concern, and Kirk took his sweet time carving up the body. He painted the room with blood liberally, a splash here and a smudge there. He scattered the severed limbs and torso pieces across the floor, leading to the bed in an intricate pattern. And finally he placed the severed head in the middle of the bed as his pièce de résistance.

Anton Karidian had a lovely daughter who would make a lovely surprise.

Instead of sitting back and admiring his handiwork, however, Kirk found himself pacing back and forth in the room with a furious energy. Karidian—no, Kodos—was due back here in half an hour, and Kirk could barely contain himself thinking about the man's expression as he walked through the door.

It took a while before he could calm himself enough to sit down on the bed, fingers still playing with the hypo he lifted from sick bay. The greenish-purple liquid contained within promised a long, agonizing death. It was the best he could do on such short notice.

Waiting was not a game he liked to play, and he had already waited for twenty-two years.

*

When James Kirk first laid his eyes on Anton Karidian, it was as if an interplanetary lightning storm jolted him out of an age-long slumber. It was fortunate that he was merely looking at a picture of the man, or his face surely would have betrayed the depth of his hatred and rage. When Spock finally moved to pry the datapad away from his hand, his first reaction was the refusal to let go.

He thought he'd forgotten about Tarsus IV by now, and in truth he mostly had. The nightmares had stopped, and the name no longer popped up in daily conversations. Kirk's youthful convictions that Kodos still lived, his grandiose dreams of vengeance—all those had fallen away somewhere along the climb to the top. In the rare moments where people brought up Kodos' name as a synonym for foolishness and weak will, Kirk merely nodded and offered agreement. He even suspected that the reason Kodos' body remained missing was that Section 31 got to the man first.

Then he came across the profile of a certain director of a traveling theatre group, and it was like a light being turned on in the endless dark. In this newfound clarity he saw Samuel’s gaunt face, oddly serene in a desert of bleakness.

_What would Sam say, if he lived to see this?_

He would never know, because Samuel Kirk’s ghost deserted him years ago and left him in that gaping darkness, alone.

*

For her part, Lenore Karidian had believed in ghosts. Barely twenty years old and raised as a bohemian outside of the Empire's institutions by her doting father, the girl's head was full of sonnets and star-crossed lovers, of Shakespeare and Bai Ju-yi. A little dashing charm served alongside the promise of exciting danger was all it took for Kirk to ensnare her in his arms.

And now, cradling the neatly severed head in his lap, the bloodied man gave a victory toast to vengeance.

"My sweet, shall I tell you a story? It's not quite as famous as your Hamlet or The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, but it's one I heard in my childhood. Indulge me, if you please."

He kissed the top of her head and turned the face towards him. Her eyes looked back at him, vacant and unflinching. Her lashes were smeared with blood.

"It happened twenty-two years ago—that's right, before you were even born. It happened on a far-off planet with a benevolent governor who oversaw a thriving mining operation.

"However, one day an alien fungus mutation wiped out most of the colony's food supply. Our good governor only had enough food to feed half of the population to even give them a shot at survival, because reinforcements were so far away. What do you think he did?"

Kirk sighed forlornly at the fathom answer.

"Precisely. The governor defied the Empire's order and insisted that everyone should receive an equal share of the food, regardless of how likely he was to survive in the end. He said that his conscience could not allow him to do otherwise. A great, principled man, wasn't he?"

He smiled and wiped his fingers on her full, red lips. Lenore looked good enough to eat—Kirk suppressed a shudder at that thought. The ghosts peered at him from the cracks of time, unmoved.

"And what this great, principled man did condemned most of the settlers to death. The food ran out on the fifth day, and for twenty days after that, chaos reigned on the colony. People turned on each other like the animals they were. I don't want to offend your delicate sensibilities, my sweet, so I’ll spare you the details. But let me just say that parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers—none of it meant anything when one was trying to stay alive.

"What happened to this man? Oh, I don't know. The mob sacked his mansion, but I'm told there was a fire, and his body was tangled in a huge pile of charred corpses, all of which were burnt all beyond recognition. By the time the Empire's reinforcements arrived, most of the colony's population was already dead or dying. No more than eighty survived.

"Yes, I'm sure he was sorry all those horrible things happened, too. He was a very kind man as far as settlement governors went, and he used to give little children candies on their birthdays. He would never do what I so happily did. Especially not to you."

He brought the head to his lips and kissed her tenderly. The flesh was soft and pliant, almost still warm.

“Yet—yet my dear, sometimes I wonder. What if that man somehow did not die on that planet? What if he used his power to keep enough food for himself and escaped death while the people in his charge were made to do unspeakable things to each other? I ask you, what then?"

*

Spock gazed down at his victim. Anton Karidian looked peaceful as though he were merely asleep. The man had a pleasant if dull face, as if he had never known the dark of the soul.

Spock knew that no such calm awaited him back on the ship. It would take Kirk very little time to realize his prey was not returning to the trap so painstakingly laid; finding the corpse and figuring out that Spock was the one behind the premature execution would take even less. Despite his captain's sometimes wild tempers, Kirk was in fact eminently capable of logic and deduction. The bottom line was, they had known each other for too long and far, far too well.

It was for this same reason that Spock was confident that Kirk's rage would eventually pass. He might get punished, confined in the brig for a while, but nothing drastic or humiliating. Kirk might shout a bit about how he was intruding on his _private life_ , but Spock knew that his logic had no flaw. It was his right and his duty to see to that the captain's private life didn't influence his capacity to function. Ever since they encountered Karidian's theater company, Kirk had been consumed by a renewed thirst for revenge, the old ghosts coming alive once more. Perhaps the rest of the bridge crew did not catch it, but Spock—and the CMO—was all too aware of Kirk's mood swings and hidden mania.

He would never allow a ghost and a name to bind James. He needed his captain in control, with eyes fixed firmly on the ever-extending space.

Nevertheless, Spock did permit Anton Karidian the gift of a swift, dignified death. For all of the man's foolish idealism, he did have one saving grace: By disobeying the Empire's orders to cull all the non-essential personnel on Tarsus IV, Arnold Kodos allowed a thirteen-year-old James Kirk to survive. James may have had to do some unspeakable things to that end, but Spock was far away enough removed from that episode of history to appreciate the irony in this tale of revenge.

He knew James would come to understand his logic, in time.

But first, the storm would come.

Spock arranged Karidian’s body so that it would stay sitting upright in the armchair. He closed the man's eyes, then asked to be beamed up to the ship.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a great time writing this fic thanks to the fantastic input from everyone involved. I had intended for this to be a drabble but before I knew it, it hit 1,500 words. ;)
> 
> Written for [](http://tarsus-iv-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[tarsus_iv_fic](http://tarsus-iv-fic.livejournal.com/) challenge prompt [#8](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%238): Mirrorverse. A huge thanks to [](http://aprilleigh24.livejournal.com/profile)[aprilleigh24](http://aprilleigh24.livejournal.com/), whose suggestions were incredibly enriching. Both [](http://jademac2442.livejournal.com/profile)[jademac2442](http://jademac2442.livejournal.com/) and [](http://feels-like-fire.livejournal.com/profile)[feels_like_fire](http://feels-like-fire.livejournal.com/) were gracious enough to provide painstaking grammar beta reading on short notice. The lovely people at [](http://issenterprise.livejournal.com/profile)[issenterprise](http://issenterprise.livejournal.com/) helped me with conceptualization of the event. I couldn’t have done this without all of you!


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